


Goodbye

by anythingbutplatonic



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: 3x01 re-do, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-11
Updated: 2015-09-11
Packaged: 2018-04-20 07:06:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4778078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anythingbutplatonic/pseuds/anythingbutplatonic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even heroes can fall.</p>
<p>A re-do of the end of 3x01/beginning of 3x02 where Oliver dies instead of Sara.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Goodbye

_How could one person bleed so much?_

Felicity had never seen so much blood. 

Until she had witnessed Greg Carnahan being shot to death live on television, a little over three years ago, she had never seen anyone die, either. 

There was a first time for everything.

It had taken her a full forty-five minutes to move his body from the alley where she had found it into the basement of Verdant, huffing and puffing as she went, tears streaking her face, leaving black lines of mascara down her cheeks. Her fuchsia pink lipstick bled into the lines around her mouth as the tears splashed onto her dress and created a tie-dye pattern of dirt and blood. 

There was so much  _blood_. 

It was smeared on the metal steps leading down to the Foundry, splattered on the floor in random shapes and lines where she had heaved him up onto the medical table. Her own bloody prints could be found on the door, the handrail, the dull green leather of his suit. 

The lids of his eyes, where she had slid them closed, unable to bear any longer their empty stare. 

The once-brilliant blue that she had so often dreamed of losing herself in - that had so often looked at her as though she were the only person left on earth except himself - was the colour of a frozen sea in death. 

One by one, she painstakingly removed the arrows buried in his chest, lay them out in a neat row alongside his body, the tips caked in dark blood that made her gag. 

Seeing them like that - seeing  _him_  like that - wasn’t anything she had ever expected, or even imagined. Not really. No, she had always thought of Oliver as indestructible. A force to be reckoned with. When he wore that suit, when he drew his bow and fired those arrows, she could be forgiven for believing that nothing could stop him. 

Until it did. 

Until she’d found him, bleeding out onto the pavement in an alley nearby Verdant, three arrows in his chest. 

Until she’d fallen to her knees at his side, her hands scrabbling at leather and wet stone, trying to stop the blood though she knew it was pointless. One look at his face, at the blank open eyes, and she knew he was dead.

Oliver was dead. 

She didn’t know who had done it. She didn’t know why. 

What she did know, was that she didn’t think she would ever be able to walk away from this. 

How could you go on when the one person in your life you had depended on the most, suddenly wasn’t there anymore?

What did you do when someone so important to you, who had entrenched themselves in your life so completely that you often found it difficult to remember what it had been like before you met them, was wiped from your life in a single instant?

What did you do when your best friend - your partner - your soulmate - was gone?

And that, Felicity knew deep in her bones, was what hurt most of all. 

That she had never used those three little words - “ _I love you” -_ and now she never would. 

Because she loved Oliver. She was  _in_  love with him. She always had been. And now he would never know.

He’d died believing she didn’t feel the same way about him as he did about her, and if she ever survived this - if she would ever be able to lose Oliver and live - then that would be her biggest regret

_Don’t ask me to say that I don’t love you_.

That’s what he’d told her in the hospital, when John and Lyla’s baby had been born. Selfishly, cruelly, unforgivably, she had begged him to take back what he’d said in the Queen Mansion all those months ago.  

And he’d told her that he couldn’t. 

What she wouldn’t give now to hear him say those words one last time, not so that she could reject them, or shrink away from them, but so that she could say them back.

_I love you, too._

She should have told him on their date. She’d wanted to. Everything had been so perfect - the restaurant, the atmosphere,  _him_  - and she should have just said those three words instead of babbling about red pens and first meetings...

If she’d known that it would end like this, she would have done things differently.  _So_ differently. Oliver wouldn’t have died thinking she didn’t love him, and she wouldn’t be feeling so guilty about it now as she placed her hand in his, the skin almost cold and the fingers limp.

She’d always liked it when he’d held her hand. Most of the time, it had been purely platonic, a gesture between friends, or he’d be helping her up if she’d fallen, or reassuring her when they were about to do something definitely dangerous and probably at risk of injury to themselves. At the time, she would feel the warmth of his skin and the roughness of scars and callouses and think, well, something very not-platonic. 

(Almost all of her thoughts about Oliver were not-platonic, when she wasn’t worrying about him getting hurt or taking too much of a risk or when she felt he was being unreasonable or stubborn. Which happened rather a lot, really, considering that Oliver was the most stubborn person she had ever met.)

There was nothing romantic about the way she held his hand now. It wasn’t a gesture of affection; it was a gesture of mourning. 

“Oliver....” Her throat dry, she choked on the syllables of his name. Her voice echoed in the empty space. “Oliver, I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

She didn’t know what she was apologizing for, really. For not saving him? For the way their date had ended? For not telling him she loved him, even though she did? 

Or maybe it was all of those things, and more, that made her sob now, the words tumbling out past her lips in a flood of raw pain and tears.

“I’m sorry, Oliver. I’m sorry for not saving you. I’m sorry I couldn’t be - be stronger, for you, to help you. I’m sorry you’re dead. I’m sorry I’ll never hear your voice again, or the way you say my name - I used to love the way you said my name - or hear you get angry when we’re not listening to you, or when you yell at Roy for using your stuff when you’re not there to supervise....” 

She cut herself off, sniffed, moved to sit on the edge of the table, closer to him. She wanted to be close to him, even now, to say all of the things she wanted to say, all of the things she wanted him to know. 

“You’ve....you’ve changed my life, Oliver. You’ve changed  _me_. Before I knew you, I was just some IT girl with genius-level intelligence who someday hoped to find a really good use for her degree from MIT that wasn’t just wall decoration. And then I joined your crusade.....At first, I just wanted to find Walter. I told you that. But somehow it became about more than just helping one person. It became about helping  _every_  person. About saving the city. I saw how passionate you were about what you were doing....how upset you got when things didn’t go your way.....and I knew that I wanted to feel that way, too. I wanted to feel like I was doing some good, and I wanted to feel what you felt when you failed, to feel that sense of loss because you cared about something.”

Felicity blinked slowly, looking down at her shoes, which were wet and muddy and speckled with blood. When she spoke next, she talked mostly to the floor, fearing that if she looked at his face she would cry and cry and never stop. 

“You are so brave, you know. You really are. Everything you’ve been through....I can’t imagine what it must have been like to suffer through those things. I don’t even  _want_  to imagine it. The more I got to know you, the more I got close to you, found out things about you....I realized how brave you really are. It’s ironic, isn’t it? Me, talking about you being brave, when you’re lying here next to me, and no life left in you. But maybe that’s the thing. Maybe it doesn’t matter that you’re dead. I mean, it does matter, of course, but being dead doesn’t take away what you’ve accomplished, the things you’ve achieved. The people you’ve saved,” she said softly, turning back to face him, “including me.”

Laid out like this, eyes closed, he could have simply been sleeping, or unconscious. But the greyish colour of his skin, the ragged wounds in his chest, the complete stillness of his body, they all gave it away. They told the truth, that Oliver was gone and he wasn’t coming back.

He was dead, and somebody had killed him. They had torn the life from his soul and left him to decay and putrefy like garbage in the heat. 

Felicity reached over his body, now, and placed her hand over the three identical holes in the front of his suit, covering the wounds left behind by the arrows. If she couldn’t see them, then she could pretend that they weren’t there. She could pretend that he really was merely asleep or knocked out, that he hadn’t died the way he had, his own weapon of choice turned against him.

“I love you, Oliver.” The words slipped out in a tear-filled sob, her whole body shaking with the force of it. “I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you....”

The pain in her chest, her stomach, the wrenching sobs that came from deep within her, bent her double over his body, so that the end of her ponytail just brushed his blood-soaked chest. Tears splashed onto his suit like rain, making the blood run in thin brownish rivulets onto the table.

 “I’m so sorry,” she repeated, over and over again, her chest heaving. “I’m so sorry. I should never have told you to say you didn’t love me, I should never have asked you to lie about the way you felt about me, because  _I love you, too_. I love you and you’re dead and you died thinking I didn’t feel the same way, but I do. I  _do_ , Oliver. I love you. I love you so much and I don’t know how I’m going to live with myself for letting you believe I didn’t.”

Her hands, stained with his blood, clutched at the front of his suit, holding on to any shred of him that might still be left, that she could take with her, whatever happened next. 

They were alone, now, but it wouldn’t stay that way for long. Eventually John, Roy, Laurel, they would all come down here and see. They would see Oliver’s body and know what had happened to him. They would grieve and mourn for him, too. And eventually, they would have to decide what they were going to do, where they were going to bury him. All of the practical things you had to think about when someone died. 

And Thea would need to be told 

But for now, Felicity wanted this time with him. To say goodbye. And to hope that, wherever he had gone - maybe Heaven, maybe Hell, maybe neither of those places, maybe nowhere - he didn’t begrudge her all of the things she never said, all of the unspoken things between them, all of the “what ifs?” that were permanently unanswered. 

Eventually, she found her voice again, though it was barely above a whisper this time, the words too precious to waste. 

“Knowing you has changed my life,” she said, “and I am going to miss you every day.” 

She straightened, moved to the head of the table, bent to press her lips to his forehead. She murmured the words against his skin. 

“Goodbye, Oliver. I love you.”


End file.
